Is it possible to save MySQL Workbench files as plain XML?

Question

DB Designer had a lot of bugs but one outstanding feature was that database models were saved in plain XML by default.

This allowed a user to diff file versions via SVN or Beyond Compare, easily finding any changes made to the database.

Unfortunately, DB Designer's succsssor, MySQL Workbench, stores files in a proprietary MVW file format, which is unreadable.

Is it possible to force MySQL Workbench to save as XML?

Answer 1

No, the current version (5.2.10 beta) does not support that.

However, the file format is not proprietary - its a simple zip archive. It contains a single XML document which is the complete database model. I wrote this SO question a couple of months ago with the same goal as you seem to have. I wanted to be able to do svn diff model.mwb

The answer I got there helped me write a small script which unzipped the file before passing it to the diff tool. It worked decently and if you're interested I can post it somewhere.

I also very recently started a thread on the Workbench forum about this issue. Hopefully someone on the development team can provide some more input on this.

EDIT: it is now being tracked by MySQL Bug #51203 with a target of 6.0.